Sunday, September 16, 2007

cutting in line results in cops putting beat down on minister

Last week a man waited in line to attend the Congressional hearings in which Gen. David "Bush's Mouthpiece" Petraeus made the case for the U.S. military continuing to occupy Iraq. The Capitol Police decided that the man should be excluded from the hearing.

The Capitol Police officer claimed the man cut in line. The man, Rev. Lennox Yearwood, a former U.S. Air Forceofficer, claims he was excluded after the officer read his button that says, "I love the people of Iraq".

In the video of the incident, there is no reference to anyone complaining about Yearwood cutting in line. I would have expected that the police officer would say something like, "These people behind you have complained that you cut in front of them in line."

Anyway, a relatively minor issue ended-up resulting in an arrest and the Capitol Police injuring Yearwood.

But don't take my word for the incident. You can see the video yourself.

Watching the video a second time, I'm pretty sure the person behind Yearwood in line is Aaron Hughes, the the president of the Chicago chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War. It seems natural that Yearwood would be next to Hughes in line, especially considering the next video (h/t Siun (Fire Dog Lake)).

My general take is that war makes everybody tense. This is especially true of wars that drag on past the point where everybody knows we're sacrificing lives just to procrastinate the elites admitting the were wrong to start the war.

This tension has the ability to make a minor issue--how often does cutting in line at the Capitol result in arrest or injury?--into something bigger. This is the same basic problem--normal people operating under tense conditions caused by war--that resulted in Allison Krause, Jeffrey Glen Miller, Sandra Lee Scheuer and William Knox Schroeder being killed by their government on May 4, 1970 at Kent State University.

[UPDATE: According to Yearwood, he and Ann Wright, Col, US Army (ret), were deliberately blackballed by Capitol Police. The officer gave tickets to people in line, but deliberately withheld tickets from Wright and Yearwood.]